Subterranean Acts of Sudden Intimacy

‘Queen of the Night’ Opens at the New Diamond Horseshoe Club

IN its heyday, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe was quite the thing — “the most zestful, gorgeous and lovable pleasure palace in town,” a critic for The New York Times wrote shortly after it opened in December 1938. Buried deep in the basement of what is now the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street in Manhattan, the theater transported audiences back to New York in the Gay Nineties, the era of Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell, in a revue stacked with old vaudeville troupers and glamorous showgirls.

Now it is back in business. The developer Aby Rosen, who bought the Paramount two years ago, has awakened the old theater from the half-century coma that it slipped into after closing in 1951, spending more than $20 million in renovations and financing Randy Weiner’s latest adventure in immersive theater, “Queen of the Night.” The show opens for a six-week run on New Year’s Eve.

Devotees of Mr. Weiner should know, in a general way, what to expect: a disruptive, interactive theatrical experience that shrinks the distance between audience and actor and takes rude liberties with conventions.

They got it, most recently, in “Sleep No More,” a deconstructed, noirish, mostly wordless “Macbeth” presented in three abandoned warehouses on West 27th Street beginning in 2011. Mr. Weiner helped bring the play over from London, along with the members of Punchdrunk, the British theater company that created it.

Before that, in the production that put Mr. Weiner on the map, they got it in “The Donkey Show,” a reimagining of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Mr. Weiner and his wife, the theater director Diane Paulus, as a disco-era karaoke for actors. And they have gotten it in spades at the Box, a combination dinner theater, cabaret and nightclub that Mr. Weiner opened on the Lower East Side with Simon Hammerstein and Richard Kimmel to present an eye-opening lineup of “fetish burlesque” performers and other determined transgressors.

With the Diamond Horseshoe as his playground, and the deep pockets of Mr. Rosen to back him, Mr. Weiner has upped the ante this time around.

“Queen of the Night,” very loosely based on Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” combines and amplifies the elements of his previous productions and throws in a few more for good measure. There’s a bit of opera, a lot of rock ’n’ roll, plenty of circus and magic, and hefty servings of food and drink, interwoven with a series of sacred and profane rituals that the audience experiences, as it were, on the move.

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Mason Ames holding up Valerie Benoit-Charbonneau in "The Queen of the Night" at the Diamond Horseshoe supper club within the Paramount Hotel.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“I wanted to get together all the people I’ve met, and putting them together seemed in the spirit of making an opera,” Mr. Weiner said during a break from a run-through of the production. The evening is presented as a “dark debutante ball” given by the Marchesa, a potently ambiguous figure, played by the Martha Graham dancer Katherine Crockett, who blends aspects of Mozart’s queen, the 1920s muse and dandy Luisa Casati, and the performance artist Marina Abramovic.

The focal point of the ball is the ritual deflowering of Pamina, the queen’s daughter. The ceremony requires a propulsive rock score and much cracking of a bullwhip. After this dark and stormy night of the soul, the evening progresses, suggestively and mysteriously, and with many distractions and diversions, toward a romantic conclusion. Judging by two early run-throughs, audiences must be prepared. In “Sleep No More,” ticket holders wear masks. They wander anonymously from floor to floor as voyeurs, with the action taking place around them. In “Queen of the Night,” there are no masks, and the role of the spectator is turned inside out.

The evening is an open invitation to intimacy — fleeting but, in theory, transformative. Guests are encouraged to mingle and wander, and many tables are communal. The queen’s butlers can and do approach. They establish intense eye contact. They embrace newcomers. They whisper mysteriously into surprised ears. They lead the willing off into secret chambers and point out the wonders within.

The scenic designer Christine Jones, who directed “Queen of the Night,” caught Mr. Weiner’s eye with her “Theater for One,” an experiment in the actor-audience relationship that she mounted in Times Square in 2011. Inside a portable booth, one actor from a rotating stock of five performed a very short play of no more than 10 minutes for one audience member at a time.

In a casual sort of way, Mr. Weiner suggested to Ms. Jones, best known as the set designer for the musical “American Idiot” and the recent “Rigoletto” at the Metropolitan Opera, that she might want to be a part of his new show. Doing what, exactly, seemed to elude both parties. “One day I said: ‘Randy, who’s directing this thing? I think maybe I should,’ ” Ms. Jones said. “And he said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’ ”

Suddenly, Ms. Jones held the controls of a grand contraption with many movable parts. Mr. Weiner, master of the revels, had brought in Shana Carroll, one of the founders of 7 Fingers, the new-wave circus troupe based in Montreal, best known for “Traces” and as part of the reconceived “Pippin” on Broadway. She brought with her 16 acrobats, jugglers, trapeze artists and one frenzied clown. Mr. Weiner had invited the food artist Jennifer Rubell to design a dinner, something suitably excessive. She came up with, among other things, fried chicken transported in big steel bird cages, and suckling pig on a spit.

The fashion designer Thom Browne, no stranger to the outer reaches of fantasy, put the butlers in androgynous black-tie uniforms with shorts, suspender socks and wildly exaggerated cuffs. Along with stars, he affixed groping golden hands on the Marchesa’s cape, including one he refers to as “the crotch hand.”

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Katherine Crockett is the lead in "The Queen of the Night."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Every single person is working outside their comfort zone and doing something they do not normally do,” Ms. Jones said. “And everyone is working with someone they’ve never worked with before.”

Trickiest of all was the casting. “Queen of the Night” involves few words, but much movement. Hence, Ms. Crockett as the Marchesa. After a round of auditions, Ms. Jones and her team decided that they needed dancers who could act, and not the reverse, for the lesser roles. Actually, dancers who could act, wait tables, direct human traffic and read minds. The ancillary roles demand a shrewd reading of faces, body language and character in order to pull off the little dances of seduction built into the play.

Ms. Jones even brought in a dominatrix to offer tips and explain how she developed “a reciprocal energy loop” with her clients.

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The intimacy works both ways. Ms. Crockett, at one point in the evening, picks out an audience member and takes him or her back to the queen’s boudoir, an inner sanctum whose walls are lined with molten candle wax. “What I am saying is, ‘Follow me, I want to take you on an adventure, she said. “The audience comes in not knowing what world they’ve stepped into. What are the rules? What is the currency?”

What is the price? Not cheap.

The basic ticket, at $125, includes a free welcome drink at the bar and the mid-performance meal. A $250 ticket includes unlimited drinks. Holders of an “ultimate” ticket ($450) get to drink and nibble on special canapés in a private room early on, then enjoy personalized table-side service throughout the evening. In addition, they can show up at any time during the one-hour mingling period, rather than the reserved time that funnels small groups of other ticket holders into the ballroom at 15-minute intervals.

At a moment when public ire is running high against the 1 percent, and the city has just endorsed a mayor with a progressive agenda, the spectacle of well-to-do theatergoers indulging in pagan rites and feasting on glorious hunks of charred beef might prove a little hard to swallow.

As Mr. Weiner tells it, though, he is simply operating an intellectual fun-house ride that starts with thrills and chills and concludes with a soft landing. After three tumultuous hours, the evening ends sweetly, at least in rehearsal versions of the play, with caressing music, an enchanting confetti snowstorm and the clear suggestion that you turn to the person next to you at dinner — most likely a stranger — and hit the dance floor.

“All the other stuff — the touching, the lights, the sound, the circus acts right in your lap — it’s to open people up to embracing somebody else in a slow dance,” he said. “I swear to you, this is what it’s about.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Subterranean Acts of Sudden Intimacy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe